Realize
One of the things that I found most outrageous about Paul Ryan in the vice presidential debate was his saying that “unelected” people should not be deciding issues such as abortion. Instead, he said, it should be left up to “the people” of a given state. The idiocy of his position is a given: the issue of abortion should be made by the individual woman. She should be respected as having the right to consult with her family and her doctor, but in the final analysis, that decision is her’s, and her’s alone.
Yet Ryan’s position is both dangerous and offensive for other reasons. It is, in fact, part of a larger agenda of the right-wing republican party. It involves both our federal government being rooted in the Constitution, and also public education. Let’s take a moment to look at each of these factors.
Although the republican party gives lip service to the Constitution -- much as they do the flag and the military -- they front for the oligarchy that runs this nation from behind a curtain. And that oligarchy is neither 100% domestic, nor does it want the concepts expressed in our Constitution to be revived. Just the opposite: the sad truth is that the corporatists are anti-American. And examples such as George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Willard Romney, and Paul Ryan provide ample evidence of exactly that.
There would be no need -- none whatsoever -- for the United States to have a federal court system, including the Supreme Court, if it was not necessary to balance the two other branches in terms of interpreting the Constitution. No intelligent person could claim that the USSC has been perfect in doing this vital task. This is true from this nation’s earliest decades, to more recent times. The two most obvious recent examples would be found in the USSC deciding important issues on purely political reasoning: the 2000 presidential election that placed the loser in the White House, and the decision to allow unlimited financial “contributions” to influence future elections.
But it more than these recent, high-profile cases. It has been in determining who is recognized as fully human, and thus having constitutional rights and protections. This has included all people who are not white men -- and plenty of white men, by the way. It has included everyone who doesn’t happen to share the ruling class’s religious belief system -- which, by no coincidence, places them in a category as “less human,” “less necessary,” and “less worthy.”
More, properly understood, the USSC should serve as the protector of individual and group rights in conflicts with corporate interests. Indeed, that is already at the very top of the mountain of issues that will define what it means to be fully what it means to be fully human in our society. Should, for example, a “religious corporation” that calls itself a church be able to decide who an adult American can or cannot marry? Or should an “energy” corporation decide that a community’s environmental integrity should be sacrificed on their alter of greed? The list goes on and on.
The truth is that the make-up of the United States of America is a-changing. Now, obviously all white men aren’t part of the oligarchy. Nor are all of the oligarchy’s members white men. But they do have similar features to one another, and they share common interests. They want to have the power to control society -- and that includes in the USA and the rest of this planet Earth. And to safely hold control over the changing population of America, they must destroy knowledge of what the Constitution has been, what it currently is, and what it can and should be.
Two of the most important ways to accomplish this are: to destroy public education, and to keep the masses in a state that involves equal parts of anxiety, ignorance, and distracted. In the proper sense, public education is one of the corner-stones of the very foundation of a Constitutional democracy. It prepares individuals, no matter what their particular talents or calling may be, to become valuable, contributing adult members of the greater society. Indeed, a sixth grade student should have the ability to identify three reasons why Paul Ryan’s call for “people” rather than the federal courts to decide constitutional issues is flawed. And a high school senior should have the ability to see the real reasons that the necroconservative branch of the republican party is determined to start a war with Iran -- a war in which they may well be called upon to kill or be killed.
Thus, the oligarchy finds it easier to deal with a pack of merry fools than with a single intelligent human being. Scare the public with “the threat of mushroom clouds” and “yellow cake.” Fill the prison-industrial complex with people caught consuming the “illegal” drugs -- because, as Abbie Hoffman noted, it’s only safe to abuse the drugs that your doctor prescribes. Forget who is actually flooding our communities with drugs -- or blame them darned college students. Keep people so distracted that they don’t realize that they’ve been hypnotized ….and that the very technology that handcuffs their conscious mind could be transformed into the tools to help them obtain their full humanity.
I could go on and on. But my editor tells me that I lose people when I carry on and on. So I will sign off for now, with hopes that I have conveyed my thoughts in a proper manner.
Fight the Good Fight!
H2O Man
= new reply since forum marked as read
Thanks H2O Man 
if we took half of what we spent on the military and invested in to education.
succinct, astute, spot on.
Thank you for your dispatch from the pond.
Thanks for the thread, H2O Man.
